Another academic year is coming to an end and these are mostly happy times. Our commencement is still a few days away, but, when I noticed that a friend was off to his son’s graduation at Penn State last weekend, it dawned on me that we are in that season already! I am sure that all those first years who made their college choices are the happiest bunch, dreaming about the college while preparing for high school graduation. I remember those days vividly though it has been a while with our two boys. It is pretty hard for me to believe that this is the third summer for me at Wellesley. Sometimes I feel like I am still settling in – people still have to explain to me certain terms and traditions 🙂

I was invited to go to a gathering of Higher Ed CIOs organized by a company called Consero. I was pretty skeptical about the whole thing. In the end, it was fun and useful. We met for a couple of days in San Diego to discuss various topics that the Higher Ed CIOs are interested in. In many cases, this turned out to be what many Higher Ed CIOs are worried about. Of course there are some who worry more than the others and the worry spectrum is highly influenced by local issues and the type of person the CIO is.

Frankly, though there are some common thread to discussions, the term “Higher Ed” is increasingly appearing to be as challenging as the term “American People”. Private College issues are different from public, large universities are different from small ones, liberal arts colleges seem to worry about completely different things than the rest, so on and so forth. In fact, someone even began making a distinction amongst the liberal arts colleges based on the endowment! The challenge therefore is to pick and choose ways in which you can benefit from these discussions as well as contribute to them in ways that they don’t appear to come from the CIO from a “wealthy”, highly selective, women’s liberal arts college from the state of Massachusetts (and therefore not applicable to the others). Despite all these challenges, we all had one thing in common – we had a lot of fun!

Security

This emerged, rightfully so, as one of the most vexing issues. Regardless of the topic of discussion, there is an aspect to security and privacy that all of us are worried about. Especially with the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environment we are living in , this gets harder and harder.  BTW, this sounds like an invitation. In reality, we have no choice because the users are not asking us and are Bringing Their Own Devices.  Critical information gets embedded in these devices or are easily accessible from them. With users usually saving passwords through browsers or other local software for convenience of use,  considerable damage can be inflicted on the users as well as the institutions if and when the device is lost or stolen. Whereas security as a theme is a really worrisome issue, we were all over the map in terms of how we are approaching it. There are many factors influencing what one can do – budget, user education, how senior administration views this issue and how they prioritize it,  myriad of federal and state laws, cloud services and finally the delicate balance between ease of use and securing services. It is fair to say that we are all at different stages of progress on this moving target.

Politics

Everyone seemed to have discovered the art of politicking in Higher Ed. Hello, where have you all been lately? I would not call it politics as much as customer relationship management. It has been my experience (this is why I am an outlier) in all three institutions I have been, that if you develop relationships with your faculty, staff and students, especially the governance representatives and senior management, you can get a lot of things done. And compromise is a big part of building any relationship. Yeah, these are also ingredients of politics. But politics has such a negative connotation 🙂 There were a lot of complaints about how creative ideas are killed because of politics. Of course, ideas get killed mainly because what is creative in one person’s eyes is not so creative in another’s. This is part of doing business and we have to accept this for what it is worth.

Moving to the Cloud

Surprising number of attendees are on track to move as many services as possible to the cloud. There are several who “worry” about cloud services in terms of reliability and security. There was considerable discussion about sharing contracts that address some of these issues. But wait! Many of them are not at liberty to share these either because of state legislative requirements or the vendors preventing them from sharing. One CIO raised her hand and said theirs is publicly available online. I participated in a panel on this and predictably, the three of us who presented had considerable differences in our opinions on what exactly it means to move to the cloud. So, we began by defining what we each meant! I have written a lot about what we are doing at Wellesley so I don’t want to repeat our strategy going forward. We are committed to moving to the cloud. In fact, the most recent announcement by Adobe is signaling how all the major software vendors are clouding. The proliferation of Smartphones and Tablets which cannot hold too much in the way of data storage, rely heavily on the cloud. These are very efficient – when Adobe wants to upgrade their software, they do it on their cloud version and all clients get them. Right now, every institution has to manage this. We sometimes cannot enforce the removal of a software even if the vendor has stopped supporting it, because some of our users will not let us. These software may be outdated and may be insecure, but, sometimes, our hands are tied. Not in the cloud based distribution model!

MOOCs

Of course, the MOOCs. Everyone is talking about it, and some, including Wellesley, have taken the bold step of experimentation. But, some, like Amherst, have come out to say that they are going to wait and see. Many of you may have noticed the recent controversy on this subject from San Jose State. This topic came up during our discussions. We all agreed on one thing – we have no idea where this is headed and how it is likely to influence higher education globally. Some are happy to be in on it early and some are very nervous that they are not. The comparison to the newspaper industry & the music industry is inevitable in this context. In other words, the core – news and music – are still being consumed heavily, but the financial model and consumption paradigms are hugely different. And the disruption changed well tested methods used for long period of time. Similarly, if MOOCs were to succeed, the core – education – will still be delivered to the learners, but in very different ways and consumed in very different ways. Some people fear that their institutions will be marginalized and left out of a revolution because of lack of initial commitment and interest. Others feel that this is all hype and it will pass. Prevailing opinion, including mine, is that the future of MOOCs is somewhere in between. And therefore, getting into it in some fashion is desirable. A fellow CIO, who I highly respect, took the “hype cycle” side and told us a story to support his side. In the late 80’s running fiber everywhere was the craze and and a university in Cleveland committed heavily to laying fiber everywhere. Hmmm… including to wired telephones!

We enjoyed a couple of cold San Diego evenings (temperatures in the 40’s) over drinks and dinner and an opportunity to even gamble. I was happy catching up with folks than gamble – well the real reason was it was for fun using bogus money! I think rather than gambling, they should have organized a game with bogus money and ask the CIOs what they would spend it on! I know where I would. Write to me if you want to know the secret 🙂